Headquartered in St. Louis, Adarza Biosystems provides innovative technology tools for medical research and diagnostic testing, for clients in industries ranging from education to pharmaceuticals. As a growth-oriented company, Adarza was looking for an agile way to build and evolve their financial model, track progress against goals, and make faster and well-informed business decisions. Using the Jirav FP&A solution, Adarza successfully enhanced ability to track and predict cash flow, increased insight into actual spend, and improved decision-making with a living financial model.
Challenge
Adarza Biosystems began as a resourceful and lean startup, leveraging Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for its financial model. Adarza’s model was time-consuming to maintain, however, and less agile than needed as the company was growing. When the leadership team wanted to refer to the model, it took time to extract data from their NetSuite financial management solution, and then manually update the spreadsheet.
“On the day you’ve updated your model, you can get a lot of valuable information. But when you want to look at your model two months later, you have to play catch up and input data,” said Nakul Tandon, Chief Financial Officer, Adarza. “You must take care during those manual updates to ensure no other part of the model is messed up in the process.”
When an important business decision needed to be made, the team needed to take time to update the model, or else decide without the most current data.
What’s more, Nakul recognized that a more robust financial model--beyond what could be easily built and maintained in a spreadsheet--would enhance operations and put the company in the best possible position to succeed. “Excel is fine if you want to build models to show at a moment in time. But when it comes to really leveraging your financial model on a regular basis--doing things like comparing budget to actuals--unless you’re an expert doing this for many years, it can be challenging,” said Nakul.
